Huffington, Ariannain full née Arianna Stassinopoulos ( born July 15, 1950 , Athens, GreeceGreek American author and commentator, best known for creating The Huffington Post, a popular liberal Web site offering news and commentary.

Stassinopoulos, the daughter of a Greek newspaper owner, moved at age 16 to England, where she later pursued an economics degree at the University of Cambridge (M.A., 1972). While at Cambridge she served as president of the esteemed debate society the Cambridge Union; she was the first foreign-born student to do so. After graduation she lived for a time in London before relocating in 1980 to the United States. She eventually settled in California with Republican politician Michael Huffington, whom she married in 1986 (divorced 1997).

Huffington started her political and journalistic career as a Republican and a proponent of small government and limited welfare. She contributed to the conservative journal National Review, and in 1994 she worked on her husband’s unsuccessful campaign for a U.S. Senate seat. In her coverage of the 1996 presidential election for the cable network Comedy Central, she was positioned as a conservative foil to lifelong Democrat Al Franken. For a time Huffington also wrote for the TV show Politically Incorrect, which was hosted by Bill Maher. In the late 1990s, however, Huffington’s place on the political spectrum began to shift to the left, starting with her opposition to U.S. intervention in the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia. She subsequently became active in numerous progressive causes, notably efforts to combat global warming. In 2003 she ran in California’s gubernatorial race as an independent, but she eventually withdrew her candidacy.

In 2005 Huffington launched The Huffington Post Web site, serving as its cofounder and editor in chief. It was structured as a group blog, publishing the words of hundreds of guest contributors each week. In addition, it provides news updates and hyperlinks to news sources and columnists. In February March 2011 it was announced that AOL was acquiring AOL acquired The Huffington Post for $315 million. Huffington was to serve as became president and editor in chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, a new venture that would include included all the content from the Web site and AOL.

Huffington was a prolific and best-selling author. Her debut work, The Female Woman (1974), was followed by biographies of opera diva Maria Callas and artist Pablo Picasso as well as by several inspirational self-help volumes. Huffington also wrote a number of political books, including How to Overthrow the Government (2000), Right Is Wrong (2008), and Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream (2010).